The Mars Room

From twice National Book Award-nominated author Rachel Kushner, whose book The Flamethrowers was called 'the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year (New York Magazine), comes a heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley.
Outside is the world from which she has been severed : the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality : thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive ; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike ; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living. Audacious and unsentimental, full of humour and tragedy, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery in Kushner's work.